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This catalogue describes an exhibition held to commemorate the United States Bicentennial. The earliest materials document American colonists’ nascent discontent with their economic and political affairs being managed from across the sea. The exhibition follows the course of the political events from early appeals for the rights of colonists and the ensuing developments of the Revolutionary Era…

Washington's letter to Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia, refusing pecuniary reward for duties performed during the Revolutionary War.

The State of Virginia, in acknowledgement of Washington's service during the American Revolution, voted him certain shares in the companies responsible for opening the navigation of the James and Potomac Rivers. Washington, replying to Virginia Governor…

In this letter to John Langdon, President pro tempore of the first Congress, George Washington accepts the Presidency of the United States, to which he had just been elected. He recognizes the need to be with Congress (then sitting in New York) as soon as possible and says that he will start his journey the day after next. The letter was discovered by a West Coast dealer in the hands of a…

This broadside is the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, printed by John Dunlap of Philadelphia on the night of July 4, 1776, and delivered to Congress the next morning. The Declaration was drafted by the Committee of Five: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman. Congress voted for independence on July 2 and the entire Congressional…

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Gutenberg Bible, New Testament.The Gutenberg Bible is the first major European printed book, and was produced in Mainz, Germany in the mid-1450s, by Johannes Gutenberg. It was the first printed edition of the Vulgate Bible, and although scholars have disagreed as to the number of copies printed, some estimates have ranged between one hundred eighty and two hundred. A recent census of surviving copies, by Paul Needham, which included both those that are complete and those that are partial, located under fifty copies, with ten copies currently in American collections.

The Lilly Library's volume consists of 116 printed leaves, comprising most of the New Testament. It was part of a Bible reportedly found in a farmhouse in…